SPRING, Tex. — It was 6:45 a.m. when Cecile Landi arrived at World Champions Centre on a recent Monday to prepare for a full day of training. Promptly at 7, roughly two dozen elite gymnasts, Simone Biles among them, filed out of the locker room and onto the cavernous gym’s floor to lightly jog, stretch and limber up for a 3½-hour practice that was followed by another in the afternoon.
Since Biles started working with her new coaches, Cecile and Laurent Landi, in October 2017, there have been days when the world’s greatest gymnast couldn’t do even this much. One morning, not long after Biles acknowledged she was among the hundreds of young gymnasts molested by a former team doctor, Cecile found her in the locker room, knotted in a ball and crying.
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Cecile gave her a hug and asked how she could help.
“I need two minutes,” Biles said. “I’ll be fine.”
Other mornings, the Landis could see all they needed to in Biles’s face and body language, and they sent her home.
“Gymnastics is supposed to be your safe place, but some days it wasn’t,” Biles explained. “They understood that. So, to keep me safe, they’d just say: ‘You need a mental break. Just go home and relax.’ ”
Two months before the Tokyo Olympics, Biles, 24, appears on track to distinguish herself from her rivals even further. With 30 world and Olympic medals, she has pioneered four signature skills that bear her name — three of those under the Landis’ tutelage — and will add a fifth in Tokyo if she successfully performs a vault so risky that no woman has attempted it in competition.
Biles’s journey to this moment has been fraught with challenges. But at the lowest moments, when giving up might have seemed wiser, the Landis served as sounding boards, advocates and a haven. And they did so while pushing the most decorated gymnast in history to be better still.
Biles’s relationship with the French husband-and-wife coaching duo represents a radical twist from the all-knowing, all-controlling methods of Martha Karolyi, the former U.S. women’s team coordinator who built a medal-winning dynasty on a climate of fear in which dissent wasn’t tolerated.
The Landis, by contrast, regard coaching as a partnership not rooted in power but in open communication with athletes, marked by the give-and-take and compromise of a relationship. Their approach reflects nearly four decades of experience — first as competitive gymnasts themselves, trained in an era in which harshness was the norm, then as coaches at prominent American gyms that developed athletes for U.S. national and Olympic teams, including their own protege, 2016 Olympic medalist Madison Kocian.
“We came to the States 17 years ago, and we have grown a lot as coaches,” Cecile said. “We have learned to be more open, more patient, and listen to our athletes.”
In Laurent’s view, there was good and bad in the Soviet-style methods that produced so many European champions and characterized the program that Romania’s Bela and Martha Karolyi imported to the United States in the 1980s.
“You need to separate the good from the bad as you can, and only keep the things that made the kids successful: the preparation, the understanding of gymnastics, the [training in handling] pressure,” Laurent said. “But the things that hurt them, you must put that as far away as possible from the sport.”
The job interview
Biles and her parents knew that her longtime coach, Aimee Boorman, would be leaving their family-owned gym north of Houston for a job in Florida after the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Games. But they didn’t seek a successor until after Biles had taken a year’s break to enjoy life and decide whether to retire or prepare for Tokyo.
Her mother, Nellie, had a candidate in mind but wanted to interview the Landis once she learned they might be leaving World Olympic Gymnastics Academy, a Dallas powerhouse co-founded by former Soviet champion Valeri Liukin, father of 2008 Olympic all-around champion Nastia Liukin.
The Landis arrived at the interview with Nellie and Simone with a plan for elevating her skills based on painstaking analysis of the sport’s arcane Code of Points, her career-best scores on each apparatus and examples for how she could add another 0.5 here and 0.5 there.
Simone’s face lit up at the prospect of even more difficult gymnastics, and Nellie knew they had found her next coaches.
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“They were really talking the same language,” Nellie said. “They were on the same page.”
Before committing, however, the Landis wanted to know why Biles, then 20, was returning for another Olympics. Was it to please her parents or sponsors? Or, rather, was it for the only requisite for success in their experience: a genuine love of gymnastics?
“We saw in her eyes that she wanted to do it for a good reason. It wasn’t from the pressure of anyone else,” Laurent said. “This is why the sport is somewhat in trouble, sadly. There is so much pressure, too much pressure, on the kids. Kids need to be kids. They will make mistakes; they will do crazy stuff sometimes. But if deep inside them they want to be successful, and they love the sport, they will find a way to get better.”
So, the Landis tabled plans to open their own gym and moved from Dallas to Spring.
“We could always open a gym later on,” Cecile said, “but coaching Simone is once in a lifetime.”
Barely three months into their collaboration, Biles’s formidable emotional strength — and her very sense of self — was shattered. As other victims prepared to tell their harrowing stories at Larry Nassar’s January 2018 sentencing hearing, Biles confronted her own.
As a competitor, she had masked physical pain, making her world-beating skills look effortless, as if gravity’s rules didn’t apply to a 4-foot-8 dynamo. As a young woman, she similarly had bottled up the abuse by USA Gymnastics’ team doctor — insisting nothing had happened each time her mother asked.
Nellie remembers clearly the day that changed. Simone phoned while driving; she had to come talk to her, she said, and started weeping.
“I knew this was going to be that conversation we were going to have finally,” Nellie recalled. “And she just walked in. Nothing was said. It was just her crying and me crying.”
A few days later, Biles told the Landis.
“We’ll do whatever you want us to do,” Cecile said. “If you want us to go scream to the world, ‘USAG, you screwed up big time!’ we’ll do it. If you want us to stand in the background, we’ll do it.”
All Biles needed was to know that her coaches were there, along with her parents, and that they weren’t judging.
“Once she recognized it and started to talk about it, she started to heal,” Laurent said.
Over the months that followed, Biles started speaking publicly, chastising USA Gymnastics for its failures and its stonewalling.
“You have that power, being Simone Biles, to just open your Twitter account, tweet something, and the world changes,” Cecile reminded her. “So use this power.”
Positive attitudes only
The scale of a 747 airplane hangar, World Champions Centre is flooded with light and furnished with brightly colored tumbling mats and equipment for roughly 1,000 gymnasts from toddlers to elites. Banners of the colleges that former pupils attend adorn the wall. From a glass-walled second-story overlook, parents can watch practice. The coaches’ office is equally transparent, with a glass door and windows adjacent to the gym floor and a sign that reads: “Attention! Only Positive Attitudes Allowed in this Area!”
WCC gymnasts don’t march around grim-faced or line up shortest to tallest, as was custom at Karolyi Ranch training sessions. But all are here to work, whether their goal is a college scholarship or a spot on an Olympic squad. And they are here for one another, particularly when someone’s routine ends in a face-first splat.
“You got this!” they chime in when the gymnast tries the sequence again.
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Biles isn’t the Landis’ only pupil. Laurent monitors several at once on different apparatuses, aided by uncanny peripheral vision and a tablet loaded with individual training plans.
“I thought you had to take it easy for a couple of days,” he says to a gymnast with an arm in a sling. “This is not taking it easy. Make sure you’re doing physical therapy; it’s more important.”
Younger girls get explicit instruction because they need a leader, he explains. But tweens and teens “must be their own leader,” he believes, and he coaches them in that. “What did you do wrong?” he asks when a skill goes awry.
Laurent doesn’t sugarcoat critiques but leavens them with a compliment: “Not a good routine, but a good fight.”
And when one girl mutters, “That’s sooo bad!” after a shaky showing on bars, he chides: “Why do you say that? If you say that, you’re going to believe it! Just make a change.”
Laurent’s expertise on uneven bars is among the reasons Biles chose him as her coach. It is her weakest event and has been a source of consternation since childhood, when she only wanted to do skills on the low bar and never reach for the high one.
Cecile’s expertise: balance beam, dance and compassion.
“She is not only here for our gymnastics; she’s here for our well-being as humans,” Biles explained. “It was kind of the perfect team we put together to take my gymnastics to new heights.”
Kocian said much the same, still grateful to the Landis, who coached her from age 9 through the Rio Games, for building her confidence, shielding her from much of the sport’s harshness and crafting training plans that safeguarded her injuries yet helped her achieve her Olympic goal.
“They coached me as a whole person, not only as an athlete,” said Kocian, a 2016 Olympic silver medalist on bars and a UCLA all-American. “They realize what you stand for, your true values outside the gym and what means the most to you.”
Cecile has been the bigger risk-taker, leaving home at 9 to train at the French national gymnastics academy in Marseilles. At 12, she visited the United States for a gymnastics camp and discovered it was as wonderful as everything seemed on her favorite TV show, “Full House.”
“The host family I stayed with had a balance beam in their living room, and I thought that was the coolest thing ever!” recalled Cecile, 41. “And we had ice cream!”
Cecile Canqueteau went on to compete for France at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics — another sign, she believed, that her future was in America.
As a young coach at the academy in Marseilles, where her boyfriend and former gymnast Laurent also coached, she used her contacts to find jobs at Bart Conner’s gym. So the couple traded their beautiful little apartment in southern France for Norman, Okla., without knowing a word of English, confident that if they worked hard, their future in America would be better than the secure, predictable careers they had in France.
“In America, people work harder than in Europe,” said Laurent, 43, when asked which country’s system of training gymnasts was superior. “The kids work harder. The coaches work harder. It’s not a difference in the system; it’s the work ethic.”
A unique challenge
Coaching Simone Biles, however, presents a unique challenge. She can do every skill, so there’s a temptation to overload her routines with difficulty.
But Cecile concluded that, on the balance beam, it was wiser to craft a routine consisting only of skills Biles loved and felt supremely confident in under pressure and find other ways to earn higher scores. Biles resisted the change, still angry at herself for a bobble in her 2016 routine in Rio. She wanted to stick with it, determined to redeem herself at the 2018 world championships.
Instead, she fell, though she still won a record fourth world all-around championship by a commanding margin.
“My plan didn’t work,” Biles conceded afterward. “What is yours?”
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Cecile’s solution was to rework the routine as she initially proposed, then finish with a breathtaking dismount. That was the genesis of Biles’s unprecedented double-twisting, double-flip dismount that now bears her name after she nailed it at the 2019 world championships, where she won a fifth all-around title.
International judges, however, deliberately undervalued its difficulty in their scoring, explaining they needed to discourage others from attempting it because it was too dangerous.
The Landis still chafe at the ruling — as does Biles, who might perform it in Tokyo, scoring be damned.
Biles’s second eponymous skill on floor — a triple-twisting double flip called the Biles II — had a different evolution. For years she had played with the feat in the gym for fun, launching herself skyward like a crazy tornado and flopping into a deep pit filled with foam cubes. The notion of landing it on a hard tumbling mat seemed preposterous.
Laurent was convinced she could, with better technique. So he set about convincing her to try by playing a game of “what ifs” and “why nots” — all while coaching her intensely.
“It’s hard to ask somebody to push themselves even more if they are already winning by a big margin,” Laurent explained. “She needed to challenge herself. This is what we’re trying to do: to get the best version of Simone Biles that we can get.”
As she prepares for her first competition in 19 months, Biles appears more purpose-built than ever, every muscle sculpted to achieve feats others only imagine. Yet at her gym, she is one of several goal-driven elites and rising Level 10s who train together six days each week.
Even when chalking her hands or waiting for her turn on the equipment, Biles cannot stand still. She is forever flexing a muscle — a big toe, an arch, an ankle — to stay impossibly pliable.
Nor can she stay quiet for long. Biles is a chatterbox and a natural performer who delights in storytelling. During one pause in practice, she performed a Martha Karolyi impression — jutting out her chest, shoulders back and chin up, as she paraded past an imaginary lineup of terrified gymnasts.
“All the times I should have cried, and I didn’t,” she said, laughing. “None of you would have ever survived!”
Biles has endured so much for the chance to push gymnastics’ boundaries further at the Tokyo Games.
Because her other skills are so far superior, she almost certainly won’t need the risky Yurchenko double pike vault to defend her all-around gold any more than she needs her spectacular beam dismount or her triple-double on the floor. Nor does she need another Olympics to solidify her place in gymnastics history.
But she has chosen this path — despite the physical pain, the emotional toll and the extra year of sacrifice — because she is driven by the same conviction the Landis have had from Day One.
She believes she is capable of more. And she wants to show the world.
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